Adolf Hitler was born in 1889 in Braunau am Inn, Austria-Hungary, the son of a customs official. Twice rejected by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, he drifted in Vienna and Munich and served as a corporal on the Western Front in the First World War, where he was decorated for bravery. He joined the small German Workers' Party in 1919, transformed it into the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), and after a failed 1923 putsch in Munich wrote Mein Kampf in prison. Appointed Chancellor on January 30, 1933, he consolidated dictatorial power within six months. The regime he led murdered approximately six million Jews and millions of Roma, Slavs, disabled people, political opponents, and Soviet POWs in a planned, industrial genocide. His invasion of Poland in September 1939 began a war that killed perhaps 70–85 million people worldwide. He shot himself in his Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945, as Soviet troops reached the Reichstag.
All Figures
Dictator of Nazi Germany · Architect of the Holocaust
Adolf Hitler
1,889 CE – 1,945 CE
The Austrian failed art student whose twelve years in power killed roughly six million Jews in industrial genocide, started a war that ended the lives of perhaps seventy million people, and remains the historical benchmark of evil.
Lifetime
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